Get the newsletter

Every other Wednesday, I’m featuring one of my favorite recipes from How to Cook Everything Fast. If you cook it, too, I want to see it—tag it on social media with #HTCEFast. And enjoy!

It doesn’t take long for bone-in chicken to turn water into a flavorful broth. Start with whole pieces, don’t overcook the meat or fuss with the bones, and you’ll have real chicken noodle soup on the table in 30 minutes.

Gianni Piscitelli, a home cook I met on a recent trip to Naples, grew up cooking with his grandmother, Maria d’Orsi, and later with his father, Attilio, in Montesanto, a residential neighborhood of the city. His grandparents were smart: They bought a sprawling place high on a hill with a view of the sea in 1933, when the area was still countryside — a home where the extended family could all live and cook together. What this family has always cooked is the food of Naples. Which is not what I thought it was.

If you grew up in Lower Manhattan when I did, 50 years ago, you might have thought you knew the food of southern Italy: Pizza, meat ragu, lasagna, stuffed shells and seafood “fra diavolo.”

The world of food and agriculture symbolizes most of what’s gone wrong in the United States. But because food is plentiful for most people, and the damage that conventional agriculture does isn’t readily evident to everyone, it’s important that we look deeper, beyond food, to the structure that underlies most decisions: the political economy.

Progressives are not thinking broadly or creatively enough. By failing to pressure Democrats to take strong stands on everything from environmental protection to gun control to income inequality, progressives allow the party to use populist rhetoric while making America safer for business than it is for Americans. No one seriously believes that Hillary Clinton will ever put the interests of Main Street before those of her donors from Wall Street, do they? At least not unless she’s pushed, and hard.

It’s clear to most everyone, regardless of politics, that the big issues — labor, race, food, immigration, education and so on — must be “fixed,” and that fixing any one of these will help with the others. But this kind of change must begin with an agreement about principles, specifically principles of human rights and well-being rather than principles of making a favorable business climate.

Strike another blow against so-called convenience and bring back the paper coffee cup with the Greek columns: foam cups and other polystyrene foam packaging, even packing “peanuts,” are going bye-bye in New York City.

They’re already banned, or will be, in over 100 jurisdictions in the United States, including the District of Columbia; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Minneapolis and San Francisco, and some 90 other municipalities in California. But the New York City move may signal the death knell for the stuff most of us call by its common (and technically misapplied) name, Styrofoam.

Every Wednesday, I’m featuring one of my favorite recipes from How to Cook Everything Fast. If you cook it, too, I want to see it—tag it on social media with #HTCEFast. And enjoy!

To accommodate Catholics who were abstaining from meat during Lent, a vegetarian version of gumbo with lots of greens—gumbo z’herbes—was often served in New Orleans. This recipe takes the same approach with another bayou classic, jambalaya.

The state of the union, food-wise, is not good. The best evidence is that more than 46.5 million Americans are receiving SNAP benefits — formerly food stamps — a number that has not changed much since 2013, when it reached its highest level ever.

Even if you allow for fraud, which barely exists (imagine being so desperate that you’d risk imprisonment for $130 a month; I doubt you can), the number would be far higher if everyone who was eligible knew it, if pride and stigma were not issues and if it were easier to enroll. Still, 15 percent of the nation is bad enough; it’s roughly equivalent to the population of Spain.

Yet when you look at the “Your Feedback” page on the White House website, among the 16 suggested topics on what the administration should address in its last two years, the word “food” is used precisely zero times. No surprise, because President Obama has been steadfastly short-sighted about this. (He has not been blind, and compared to his predecessor he’s been downright brilliant. But you need a better yardstick than W. by which to measure presidents.)